Related papers: Mixing by microorganisms in stratified fluids

Efficient swimming at low Reynolds numbers is a major concern of microbots. To compare the efficiencies of different swimmers we introduce the notion of ``swimming drag coefficient'' which allows for the ranking of swimmers. We find the…

Suitable asymmetric microstructures can be used to control the direction of motion in microorganism populations. This rectification process makes it possible to accumulate swimmers in a region of space or to sort different swimmers. Here we…

The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…

Many aquatic microorganisms are able to swim. In natural environments they typically do so in the presence of flows. In recent years it has been shown that the interplay of swimming and flows can give rise to interesting and biologically…

The interaction between swimming microorganisms or artificial self-propelled colloids and passive (tracer) particles in a fluid leads to enhanced diffusion of the tracers. This enhancement has attracted strong interest, as it could lead to…

We investigate the hydrodynamic interactions between microorganisms swimming at low Reynolds number. By considering simple model swimmers, and combining analytic and numerical approaches, we investigate the time-averaged flow field around a…

Several meters below the coastal ocean surface there are areas of high ecological activity that contain thin layers of concentrated motile phytoplankton. Gyrotactic trapping has been proposed as a potential mechanism for layer formation of…

The mixing effectiveness, i.e., the enhancement of molecular diffusion, of a flow can be quantified in terms of the suppression of concentration variance of a passive scalar sustained by steady sources and sinks. The mixing enhancement…

Synchronization of two actuated sheets serves as a simple model for the interaction between flagellated microswimmers. Various factors, including inertia, sheet elasticity, and fluid viscoelasticity, have been suggested to facilitate the…

Due to its great efficiency and maneuverability, undulatory swimming is the predominant form of locomotion in aquatic vertebrates. A myriad of animals of different species and sizes oscillate their bodies to propel themselves in aquatic…

Slicks are thin viscous films that can be found at the air--water interface of water bodies such as lakes, rivers and oceans. These micro-layers are enriched in surfactants, organic matter, and microorganisms, and exhibit steep physical and…

Using a fluid-particle dynamics approach, we numerically study the effects of hydrodynamic interactions on the collective dynamics of active suspensions within a simple model for bacterial motility: each microorganism is modeled as a…

Experiments have recently shown the feasibility of utilising bacteria as micro-scale robotic devices, with special attention paid to the development of bacteria-driven micro-swimmers taking advantage of built-in actuation and sensing…

Density stratification in geophysical environments can be non-uniform, particularly in thermohaline staircases and atmospheric layer transitions. Non-uniform stratification, however, is often approximated by the average ambient density…

Most aquatic vertebrates swim by lateral flapping of their bodies and caudal fins. While much effort has been devoted to understanding the flapping kinematics and its influence on the swimming efficiency, little is known about the stability…

This article presents a computational approach for determining the optimal slip velocities on any given shape of an axisymmetric micro-swimmer suspended in a viscous fluid. The objective is to minimize the power loss to maintain a target…

Many species of fish, as well as biorobotic underwater vehicles, employ body caudal fin propulsion, in which a wave-like body motion culminates in high-amplitude caudal fin oscillations to generate thrust. This study uses high fidelity…

In this fluid dynamics video, we show that low Reynolds number swimmers, such as Caenorhabditis (C.) elegans, synchronize their gait when swimming in close proximity to maximize utilization of space. Synchronization most likely results from…

We used precomputed steady states obtained by a spin-up for a global marine ecosystem model as training data to build a mapping from the small number of biogeochemical model parameters onto the three-dimensional converged steady annual…

Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…